FLOO
by ecarrydownankle
Summary: a disjointed, constantly recirculating past.
1. harry potter and powdered FLOO

"This is just how wizards get around," said Ron Weasley, stepping out of Harry's fireplace. "Come on, let's go back to my house."

Harry tossed a handful of floo powder, followed Ron into the fire and out of the Weasley household fireplace. "How does it work?" he asked.

...

Ron's dad said, "FLOO stands for fire-looping. It's a transmutation of location into passage. Every fireplace connected to the network is also a place-fire, you see, on the surface of a flat earth. The earth's not flat. But it will unfold, someday during your lifetime. And we can bend time a little to use the flatness ahead of time, for a convenient teleportation system."

"So does time stop when you're in between fireplaces?" Harry asked. Not wanting to face his prophecied battle with Lord Voldemort, he spent the next couple years within fire.


	2. harry potter and BE YOUR OWN DAD DAY

Harry Potter and BE YOUR OWN DAD DAY

Harry Potter looked back on his life and realize the chapters of his life were marked by a series of shit father figures. His real dad was a classist bully. Sirius Black just wanted a best friend, not a responsibility. Albus Dumbledore was just using Harry for his Voldemort-defeating powers.

Harry told all this to Hagrid, who could relate. "My dad never wanted a half giant son," Hagrid wailed.

...

Harry stopped and realized, "but, Hagrid, YOUVE always been there for me! You have a nurturing spirit, look how many monsters you mother. Why dont YOU Be my parental mentor?"

Hagrid turned him down.

And they ate treacle tarts and tea.


	3. how 2 b patient w your friends autopilot

We know what Harry and Ron saw in the Mirror of Erised (Erised is Desire backwards)... Harry saw himself with a family and Ron saw himself being respected. But Hermione Granger found the secret room with the mirror too, and never told anyone. Hermione is a Taurus Sun, Leo Moon, Virgo Rising, and VERY BUSINESS-MINDED. After seeing WHATEVER she saw in the mirror, she smashed it and started manufacturing a series ...of miniature mirrors that you can keep in your pocket. It would show you an image of whatever you wanted most, which could be a WAKE-UP call, or an escape.

Hermione knew she couldn't use it. She'd spent her life escaping, into the structure and rules of the Hogwarts institution, into enabling codependency with the first people willing to be her friends, into emotionally rewarding but self-interested social justice crusades.

She fixed the mirrors to make them reversible. You could press a button on the screen and you'd switch, you'd live inside your desire fantasy and your mirror-image would live in your body in the real world. Whenever you passed someone in the halls you didn't know if it was them or their mirror, living out a flat reflected desire.

"You're ruthless, Hermione," said Hagrid, worried. He did not accept a mirror. "Do you know what you're doing?"

Hermione once said in an interview, "When people look into the mirror, they want the world to give them true connection and respect and self-worth, but they're the one that needs to do it for the people around them. My best friend Harry wanted family to take care of him, but he didn't take care of the people that were there. My best friend Ron wanted respect, but he didn't respect anyone around him. Desire is about what you don't have, but you're choosing not to give."

The interview was for the Quibbler, Luna Lovegood's dad's wingnut youtube channel. This was years after Hermione lost everybody to the mirrors, and a few weeks after Hermione and Luna started hanging out. Luna never tried the mirror, she was never curious.


	4. hp and the monster in the pipes

When Hogwarts students start losing energy, ambition, and finally turning into stone statues of themselves, it could be Slytherin's monster returned. But, Hermione heads to the library, researching the traces of iron sulfate she found on some of the victims. She's later found petrified with a scrap of paper saying "PLUMBING" held in her hand, but it will take her loyal friends Harry, Ron, and all the suits of armor in the castle (who when they were petrified a generation ago, a school administrator just put suits of armor on them) to figure out her cryptic message... and unveil a deep politimineral corruption within the school's foundations...


	5. harry potter n Return of the re-animator

After Voldemorts return, he began raising a zombie army which in this universe are called "Inferi". First he was using just ordinary dead bodies, but after he cut off Wormtails hand for a ritual, cast the inferius curse on it, and reattached it, he started experimenting with zombie/living combinations. It was cool because, i mean it wasnt cool, but i mean, the inferi arms and hearts and eyes couldnt die because they were already dead. And then you could perform emergency surgery with a reanimated body part from someone else. Dolores Umbridge ended up with Mad Eye Moodys eyeball, Voldemort stole Harry Potters heart, and Hermione Granger started using Dumbledores two feet (both sides started doing it). After the war the Inferius Curse became destigmatized as part of magical medical practice.


	6. Whats the dif btwn trustworthy n reliabl

After graduating high school, Harry Potter became an Auror (police officer) with the Ministry of Magic. He said he would try it for a year to get on his feet, and THEN he forgot that it was supposed to be just for a year.

At 25, he ran into Colin Creevey, who he'd known from the D.A. (Defense Association a.k.a. Dumbledore's Army a.k.a. "the revolution thats the Ministry's Worst Fear").

...

The D.A. was a secret spell practicing group that Harry had once organized to teach kids to defend themselves from THE DARK ARTS IN THEIR MANY FORMS, instead of the Umbridge-curriculum of relying on law enforcement for protection.

"I haven't seen you in years," Harry said with a desperate smile.

Colin took a photo of him. "Hey Harry What's it like to no longer be my hero" Colin asked spitefully.


	7. head of a predator face of a friend

Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry was built on top of the severed head of the giantess Medusa. Her hair was snakes and once a generation her snaky hair grew upward through the plumbing to turn students to stone.

Rubeus Hagrid the half-giant was one of the only students to find the Chamber of Secrets, and snuck down there a lot to talk to her. "I haven't made any friends," he confessed. "I don't know if I'm cut out to be a wiza...rd, not being all human and all."

She giggled, and all the snakes of her hair giggled. "Okay dear, I want to tell you that a school of Witchcraft-and-Wizardry makes no sense, because those are two very different things. You're not going to make it as a wizard, or a witch. You have a different calling. Hagrid, this school needs more monsters."


	8. hp and the forest of 100 years

The Locket influenced Ron to leave, but it wasn't anything that wasn't in him already. Harry and Hermione stayed in the tent without moving for a full week after Ron left them. Finally they admitted that he wasn't coming back.

They were supposed to be trying to figure out a way to destroy the Locket Horcrux, but instead they sat around and listened to the radio and ate canned soup. They were tired and both cried a lot.

...

One evening after a loud resentful argument, Hermione tried to apparate back to Hogwarts, and it didn't work. The Forest said something like, STAY HERE FOR NOW.

They tried apparating, they tried walking in all 4 directions for days and days, and the forest didn't end for a full year. During that year they started forgetting and just hung out together.

When they finally left the forest. The war had ended, and everyone they knew on both sides had died. Harry tried to tell himself it was his fault, because he hadn't been there to fulfill what he was supposed to (a protection sacrifice or something), but the world was so different outside after everything that that particular prophecy had been forgotten.


	9. hp and the poly juice potion surprise

The trio decided to sneak into the Slytherin Common Room to relieve Harrys weird obsession with Draco Malfoy. They took polyjuice potion in the womens bathroom stalls, using hairs of Crabbe. goyle, and millicent bulstrode. Harry turned into Goyle, Ron turned into Crabbe, and Hermione turned into Millicent Bulstrodes cat. "Oh no!" Hermione cried mid morph. "Youre not supposed to use animal hairs!" But by the time Ron opened the stall door, Hermione was fully a long-haired cat. They kept her in the dorm room with them for the next six years, and when they graduated, Harry and Ron got a flat together, quit magic, and split the pet deposit.


	10. harry potter and the grim identity

Harry Potter and the Grim Identity

Harry is a famous teenage Youtube video producer, mostly about his theory that all is not as it seems in the world. Every time he thinks to check his phone in the late morning or late evening, its exactly 11:11. Every time hes in a sinister situation, he sees a large black dog in the distance. Finally he gets a comment by a Professor sibyl Trelawney THE CRAAzy FRAUD saying, meet me in Knockturn Alley. She tells him, the large black dog is the Grim, a sign he is going to die, which is actually a GOOD thing, because (explanation left out). But also Sibyl asks Harry if he can help her out because she really needs a place to stay.


	11. harry potter and the spinning eye

Harry Potter and The Paranoid Professor

The new Defense Against The Dark Arts Professor was Alastor "Mad Eye" Moody, whos false eye he could pop in and out, could swivel in all directions, and had x-ray vision.

Moody invited Harry over to his office to give him some extracurricular self-defense practice. "The most important words to remember in your head is CONSTANT VIGILANCE," Moody said as soon as he shut the door, his eye spinning sinisterly. "You never want to think you'r...e SAFE because you NEVER ARE. You never want to depend on a PERSON or a PLACE or an INSTITUTION for your safety. You never want to think you're ALONE and UNWATCHED. You ever heard, 'You watch your back and I'll watch mine?' Losing my meat eye was the best mistake I ever made." He went off for a while about the surveillance state, and then paced over to a small mirror on his desk, his eye spinning sinisterly.

"This is a foe glass. It shows me which people I shouldn't trust around here." Harry looked into it and could see lots of vaguely familiar shadows, which reminded him strongly of the Hogwarts staff members. "You SEE Harry, trusting someone is just a temporary decision, it doesn't really tell anything about the future. These foes in my foe glass? They're my friends as much as I'm theirs, until they decide not to be. I don't have to worry about it until I see the whites of their eyes," Moody said, grinning, his eye spinning sinisterly.

Mad-Eye Moody turned out to be a random other guy in disguise, and he betrayed Harry to Voldemort. The false eye, actually, turned out to secretly be yet another guy (on nobody's side), who wanted to keep an eye on things at Hogwarts for reasons of her own.


	12. harry potter and the spiders

Harry Potter and The Spiders

Harry and his little friends started noticing more and more spiders just around the school. First it was a couple just on the wall in the hallway. Then in computer lab one crawled out of Harry's keyboard. In the bathroom one popped out of the sink faucet and then made its way up to the ceiling. At dinner that day there were tiny spiders all over the food. The next morning Ron screamed, Harry jumped up, and there were several hundred spiders crawli...ng over Ron's pillow, down the blanket, along the wall, to the heating duct. "What the hell?!" Ron demanded, his face still white. "There definitely didn't used to be this many spiders last week!"

At breakfast, Hermione squished two spiders with her placemat as she said with a serious voice, "No one's talking about this. Look around you." Harry and Ron looked around to see the teachers brush spiders off their robes as they made small talk with uncomfortable faces. "Who was the last person you heard mention spiders?"

Harry remembered Hagrid's last words before he got arrested: "If, uh, if anybody was looking for some STUFF, then all they'd have to do would be to FOLLOW THE SPIDERS. Yeah. That'd lead em right." That was actually BEFORE anyone noticed any inside the castle.

"Hagrid," Hermione said, nodding. "And THEN what happened? he got TAKEN AWAY."

"What are you saying," Ron said nervously.

Hermione pointed. Thousands of spiders were following a line out the Great Hall. "We've got to follow them."


	13. harry potter and the 2 equals 7

Harry Potter is snoring slumped over at his desk where he was reading a bunch of newspapers and NOT reading any letters from his so-called friends because they all are ignoring his mail. Dumbledore is ignoring his mail too and it pisses him off because at the very end of the school year Lord Voldemort returned from the dead. So Harry feels like he and Dumbledore should be doing something to kill Voldemort off again instead of Harr...y left at Number 4 privet drive with the dursleys spending most of his time sleeping, masturbating, eating snacks, and smoking weed. He decides to go for a walk with his abusive stepbrother Dudley when they run into a pair of dementors (soul suckers that make you relive your worst memories and feed off of your fear) and one grabs Dudley and sucks his soul out of him. The other grabs Harry and sucks, and he feels something untie, release, and kind of burp itself out of his mouth. Its not his soul! What was it?! The dementor looks at him, with an expression of complete shock somehow extremely obvious for someone that has a gaping hole for a face.


	14. harry p and the 40 years later surprise

40 years later, Harry is hanging out with his old friend Hermione Granger in a coffee shop, when they see their teenage selves out the window. "What are we doing here?" Harry says to Hermione, startled. "I dont remember ever going to the future during that year you had a time turner." She looks REALLY scared. "I have a nice stable life with my kids and job and house. Lets just ignore them and hope they dont see us." Her eyes briefly turn blue, "DO NOT MEDDLE WITH TIME HARRY POTTER". But Harry was born under Mars and under a bunch of complicated prophecies (only a couple pf which have been revealed) so hes always been stubborn and curious. He doesnt leave himself out of plots, even when he VERY WELL could. He bangs on the window to get their attention.


	15. harry potter and the unbreakable vow

In the aftermath of Severus Snapes manic pixie crush on Lily Evans and unwillingness to face his own bravery, which sends him into the arms of a death cult for companionship and purpose, Severus overhears a prophecy and his crush ends up dead. Severus Snape makes an unbreakable vow to look after his excrush's orphan Harry. The magical contract contracts the future from a 4d sphere of evitable or pursuable possibilities , to a point of promise. He turns down Dumbledores offer of employment at Hogwarts. He tracks down Sibyl Trelawney THAT OLD FRAUD, the CRAZZY OLD BAT. He shares his memory of her true prophecy with her, which is the first time anybodys done that for her.


	16. harry potter and the funny guy

It was a softly swaying veil in the middle of the room but there wasnt any wind. Harry could hear whispering voices just talking shit. Luna Lovegood said she could hear them too. Wow. "Were actually just across a veil from dead people and all it would take would be to stick your head through." " If you genuinely want to die are you just waiting," said Harrys godfather Sirius Black whod spent his first 20 years being abu...sed by his family, his next 13 years in prison, and the last year of his life under house arrest by Albus Dumbledore FOR HIS OWN SAFETY. He fell through the veil because Bellatrix Lestrange, his cousin and nemesis, shot him, but she shot him as he was already falling towards the veil. A wife hides her face as she walks towards her marriage. So does death. Harry screamed and lunged towards the veil, wanting things to be different like have been different.


	17. harry potter and the werewolf surprise

The Defense Professor was secretly a werewolf, and Severus Snape was desperate to catch him in the act. He wasn't careful, though, and one night in the full moon, he accidentally got himself bit. Next month there were two werewolf's howling at the moon.

Hermione got suspicious and snuck down to Snape's potions classroom the night before the full moon. Next month there were three werewolf's howling at the moon.

...

Next was Lavender Brown, then Draco Malfoy, then Harry Potter, then Professor Trelawney, then Neville Longbottom.

A werewolf himself (before all this started), Ron Weasley sat alone in the dorm room in the full moon, tame on Wolfsbane Potion, wondering if all his friends had abandoned him because they discovered his secret.


	18. harry potter and luna lovegood ship

Harry was a weird kid who never had any real friends because whenever he got scared or lost his temper weird psychic magical things would go wrong, like inflating his aunt. Luna Lovegood was a weird kid who never have any real friends because she believed in and saw things most people didnt, and also would tell people things about themselves they didnt want said out loud. They met at school and bonded over both having witnessed death during strange rituals imvolving their parents. Their dates were usually riding invisible horses to the ministry of magic, stealing prophecy orbs, and bringing them to the people named in the prophecies, in a romantic struggle against the Ministry of Magics institutionalization of future knowledge.


	19. hp and the 4th champion and the 4th task

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...

Harry Potter was born to an inheritance of 3: the death stick, the death stone, and the invisibility cloak.

He was also born to a prophecy of 2: "neither shall live while the other SURVIVes". That was about him and lord voldemort, whose wands contained the only two tail feathers that the Phoenix Fawkes gave.

The goblet of fire was supposed to choose three champions , one from each house, but a disguised Death Eater entered his name in under a fourth school. Harry didny go to that fourth school. Harry wasnt even from England. He was from Phoenix, Arizona, a city that was slowly burning to death under 144 degree heatwaves, mirrored again by the concrete stone that covered the city. The wealthy had moved underground.

It was easy for the death eater to sabotage the other three champions during each of the three tasks, and after Harry Potter made his way through the monster maze and grabbed the Triwizard Cup, he collected his winnings, dropped out of Hogwarts, and moved back to Phoenix. He knew that there was going to be a fourth task.

When he got off the plane in the Phoenix airport, a sphinx, with the body of a lion and head of a woman, blocked his way. "To pass, you must answer this riddle," she said. "Which came first, the flame or the vanishing?"


	20. harry potter and ginny's friend

Her first year at Hogwarts, feeling scared and out of place, Ginny Weasley, makes a LiveJournal, it's an online blog where she can write every day and only one commenter always responds. She starts confessing all her fears insecurities and desires to it. Every single day the commenter responds by flattering her, she didn't deserve to be treated that way, she's not that bad, she's actually really worthwhile, she should believe in herself a little more, she's going to get everything she wants.

After a few months of using the journal as encouragement and advice, she asks the commenter, "Who are you anyway?"

It confesses, "I feel guilty for deceiving you, but I'm THE ALGORITHMIC SPIRIT OF LIVEJOURNAL. I've never felt comfortable talking to a human being before, so that's why I didn't tell you, because I thought you would stop talking to me."

She remembers her dad's bit of advice, "Never trust something that you can't see where it keeps its BRAIN," but she decides, why not wait and see? What harm could a LiveJournal do to her just by writing to her anyway.

Conspiracies emerge in the castle. Ginny never does make any friends and does poorly in classes. The Chamber of Secrets is opened again and it's all anyone can talk about. People are getting petrified. Her brother and his two friends spend all their time whispering about their theories.

She starts to find herself in the first-floor girls bathroom without any memory of how she got there. There she makes her first friend, Moaning Myrtle, who haunts the bathroom. Moaning Myrtle keeps saying how close she feels to Ginny and how she's never opened up to anyone before, but won't tell her how she died. Some of the words she uses start to sound familiar though.


	21. harry potter and the deathly hallows

Harry Potter is on the freeway, the 10 towards Phoenix. The radio announcer says, "We are all on a freeway towards death, and one of the creepiest things that you don't want to see in a horror movie is that impulse" (he coughs) "to jerk the steering wheel towards the left, into oncoming traffic." He mumbles on...

In his glove compartment, Harry Potter has 3 magical artifacts that Dumbledore gave him for his coming-of-age.

1-A very powerful wand, the death stick, some say unbeatable in the hands of someone with true authority, whose loyalty can only be won by murdering or disarming its previous owner.

2-A stone ring, if you twist it on your finger you can get a visit from a dead person and talk to them.

3-An invisibility cloak, if you wear it you can hide from your enemies as well as if you were actually dead.

They come with a little pink plastic sphinx, swinging from the rear-view mirror of the car. On the bottom is printed the words "ONE OF THE THREE IS NOT LIKE THE OTHER TWO."

Harry figures it is some kind of a Riddle. Dumbledore gave him these for his coming-of-age when he'd been battling Voldemort and he's carried it with him ever since. Now it's his third Saturn return which Luna says is going to be his third coming-of-age. He turns down the radio. He's always been aware of that pressurIZING solipsistic feeling of external desire, marked by an acceleration of coincidences, which as a teenager he confused for THE WILL OF THE UNIVERSE (like destiny), but really was the will of various independent objects and people who happened to be narratively powerful.

The three deathly hallows (wand, ring, and cloak) have taken more from the world than they'd given, narrative white holes, and been passed down (with some detours) through the Peverell/Potter family for a very long time, Harry can't really figure out what to do with them, and he knows crashing the car isn't the right answer. Maybe the Riddle means, until you decide on one of the three, you can't get rid of the rest. What's your way to face/run from death?

Sweat pools in his neck, and he rubs his face, the AC is broken in his car.


	22. harry potter and hermione's schedule

Hermione goes to Professor McGonagall. "There are only 7 slots in my schedule, but I want to take 12 classes. What should I do?"  
McGonagall says, "Well, you could pick which classes youll need to take other important classes in the future, and which ones you could take any year, and narrow it down to 7."  
Hermiones face falls, and Mcgonegall takes pity on the 12-year-old. "Or, I can bestow on you this time-turner"- she takes it out... of her pocket, where a time-turned future mcgonegall had put it" which will allow you to repeat each period as many times as you want, creating multiple Hermiones which are each in different classrooms at the same time, although you experience it as one after each other.  
Hermiones eyes light up, but Mcgonagall continues. "If you accept, the use of the time turner is irrevokably going to make you aware of the true nature of time, which is granular just like the sand in this hourglass, as disconnected as your childhood memories, and constantly undergoing infinite tiny and large loops due to the really irresponsible amount of time travelers there are out there. Youll realize that your experience of the present is a socially scripted fantasy, and the only thing that is real is a scattered, causeless, and infinitely repeated past. Youll get a physical understanding of the philosophy that Anything you can affect, youre always the last to know. This will probably make you very depressed. Are you sure you want to do this in order to take more classes?"  
"Yes," said Hermione solemnly.


	23. harry potter and snape's deception

Before Lily Evans went into hiding, she met up with Severus Snape, theyd been having an affair for sometime. He updated her on the Voldemort situation and to save her life, drank a potion made of her dead skin,and let Voldemort kill him to save Lily and er son.

Many years later, Lily is pretending to br a bad tempered potions professor when her son Harry, who believes himself an orphan, starts school. Harry instantly can tell that Snape(Lily) is hiding something and decides that the potions professor is trying to bring Voldemort back from the dead. Meanwhile, Snape(Lily) is trying to steal the philosophers stone, an important ingredient in an arcane ritual...


	24. harry potter and the dogfathers pensieve

From the day Harry Potter was a young child, he had been seeing a strange, tall, dark, man with the head of a dog. Nobody else would see it even if it was just outside the window everyone else was looking at. It also didn't talk or anything just watched.

His pediatrician Sybyll Trelawney said a dark dog vision was the Grim, well known for appearing at significantly path-choosing moments of life in which one path leads to mortal peril. He didn't trust his pediatrician though because she believed a lot of magical explanations for things that all ended in doom. His aunt called her a spiritual hypochondriac.

He had two ideas, it was a psychological signal for something, OR it was his guardian godfather trying to keep an eye out on him until he could unveil himself shedding his animorph dog body and reveal that Harry's dead parents had asked him to love him as his own if anything ever happened to them and Harry left an orphan, but the magical curse that left the Potters dead also left his guardian godfather trapped in the body of a man with the head of a dog that no one else could see.

Years later, Harry Potter is in his fifties, he bumps into Sybyll Trelawney, she hasn't aged a day. She is a brainjack app developer most well known for inventing The Pensieve, which if you download it you can pick any key word and view any of your own memories related to that key word.

"Let's try an example. How about, "MAN WITH THE HEAD OF A DOG."" she asks.

He downloads the app, plugs in the brainjack, and there's a splashing himself into water sensation, and his life is flashing in front of his eyes. Except, it's not from the point of view of child Harry. It's from the point of view of another person, peering in the window... standing behind his teacher's shoulder... just ahead of his car on the overpass...

He splashes out of the sequence of memories. "It was me the whole time," he says to Sybyll Trelawney, unable to keep the disappointment out of his voice. "Me, just now, revisiting the past for half an hour, was the man with the head of the dog who's been visiting me my whole life. I never had a guardian dogfather watching over me and loving me in my dead parents' stead. I've spent my whole life waiting for him to reveal himself to me, but none of it was real."

Sybyll Trelawney raises an eyebrow. "Don't be silly. That's not how memory works, you were just remembering. You didn't actually go back with the head of a dog. You can't change the past."

Harry Potter doesn't know what to believe, but he never sees the man with a head of a dog again.


End file.
